Musings
It always makes me nervous to write things like this, as a white woman, who of course has a lot of privilege in this society in ways of which I am both aware and unaware. I fear what I say will be unconsciously arrogant, uninformed, or insulting. Still, its as thing that comes to mind time and again and perhaps other women and girls out there will recognize things like this from themselves. Also as an American I only can speak from the concept of someone raised in America. I have no idea how this works in another country – I suspect in places like Canada and the UK it may be similar, and less so in “non-Westernized” countries.
I don’t want to imitate the “feminism lite” or “but the Patriarchy Hurts Men Too!” folks. Rather what I am curious about, or perhaps theorizing, or otherwise exploring, is the ways in which the White Woman is an icon, an un-reality to which even real “white women” are held and found wanting. As a woman we are all supposed to want to be the White Woman while simultaneously despising her for her stupidity, shallowness, vanity, and helplessness. The White Woman is put on a pedestal for examination by everyone, for false praise behind which lies a not-so-secret desire to knock her down, blacken that pale skin of her face with fists, defile her pristine clean virginity by rape, insult her clothing, her makeup, her body, and then to dismiss her as ultimately irrelevant.
And furthermore there is one central icon of the White Woman, nearly ubiquitous in its popularity and thrust upon even the tiniest female children as part of the brainwashing process on her place in American society, and that icon is Barbie. Barbie is the perfect, iconic White Woman. Her skin is pale and flawless. Her hair is almost always light blond, and long, wavy, flowing. Her breasts are gigantic and buoyant (and completely without those disgustingly sexual nipples), her waist tiny, her hips smoothly rounded without love handles and no trace of cellulite. A lipsticked smile is permanently fixed on her lightly and tastefully made up face. Her eyes are blue, her nose small. She has no wrinkles and her feet are poised to slip into one of the many pairs of high-heeled shoes she owns – so formed, she is literally unable to stand on her own two feet. She comes in any of a number of personas – ballerina, fairy princess, modern car driving fun girl, winter ball gown 2000 Barbie, any of a number of outfits which determine entirely who she is.
Reading various sites today I saw the suggestion for white people to read the Bluest Eye. I had read that years ago and thought on some of the same things I think on now. Oddest of all was the sense of identification.
The highest compliment my mother could pay to any woman was “She looks just like a Barbie doll – she’s BEAUTIFUL!” Sullenly I went about my un-beautiful childhood, brown haired, brown eyed, freckled. We watched Little House on the Prairie – my mother cooed over that gorgeous little blond blue-eyed Nellie Olsen and looked at me sadly, shaking her head. I wouldn’t brush my hair – the tangles made it so that, although long, it bore no resemblance to the smooth tresses of my dolls. Clearly, something was wrong with me, and I knew it. Ugly, ugly, the kids at school called me. I believed it.
I got Barbie dolls for Christmas and my birthday every year, one, sometimes two, a constant reminder to me of what beauty was, what I was supposed to strive for, and how far I fell short. Occasionally, I received a Skipper doll (an adolescent with flat feet who could actually stand up) or some off brand doll. One of these I remember clearly – a doll shaped like a little girl with long dark hair and brown eyes. The make believe games I played with my dolls I remember well and are very telling, and indeed, appalling, to me now, to think back on this and see how deeply these ideas are implanted in my head.
All of my dolls were fairies, mystical beings. The tall, blond, “beautiful” Barbies were “good fairies”. The two or three Ken dolls someone had seen fit to give me were evil violent monsters who wanted to hurt the good fairies and would hatch elaborate schemes to kidnap them and do various forms of harm to them. When kidnapped, of course, they were powerless to resist, but fainted, were easily overcome, and suffered horribly while crying the entire time. And all the schemes they used to kidnap the good fairies were done, of course, with the help of the “bad fairy” – the doll with dark hair.
The one who looked like me.
She lied. She stole. She manipulated them into thinking she was their friend only to betray them later. Everyone knows in the fairy tales, it’s the dark-haired girl who is the wicked temptress, the one who brings down her good, blond sisters out of jealousy. I looked in the mirror every day and knew I couldn’t be “good”. I wanted to scrub away my freckles, pleaded to shake the baby fuzz off my legs at age six, wished I could turn my hair curly and blond, my eyes blue. At six I already knew what was beautiful. I knew beautiful people were loved and admired and the ugly shut out. And I knew I couldn’t fit.
Later in life, as the batch of teen movies of the 80-s came out, I was given another model to look to – the completely non-sexualized intelligent dark haired girl with glasses. The blond bombshell was still there, still most wanted, still shallow, still clearly most highly prized, but sometimes a lower status male who couldn’t get the prize of White Womanhood would stoop toward a lowly wallflower of a dark haired girl! See, there was hope! In the meantime, better study hard to get a job to support yourself, girl, because god knows if anyone will ever marry you.
Looking back on this now, it strikes me that much of this probably stems from racism and how deeply internalized it is, even being used within white culture against other people who “pass for white” and consider themselves white without question. This becomes more interesting to me as, within the midst of a genealogy project I undertake for my family, I find strong evidence we are NOT purely descended from nice, safe, European ancestors. Of course this is not something anyone talks about or wants to acknowledge among them, even though, looking at my family from an outside perspective, there is a distinct lack of blue eyed blonds – in fact, almost everyone in the family has hair ranging all the way from dark brown to jet black, deep brown eyes, and skin that tans a deep brown with surprising ease. The likelihood of us having an unbroken “pure” string of European ancestors seems low indeed. Yet we all identify as “white”.
Speaking of which, I now am recalled to a situation in the family about which I will only speak of in the most general of terms in order to protect those who don’t wish to be identified, in the way, way off chance that anyone would figure out who I am from this blog.
A certain uncle of mine had two wives. His daughter from a first marriage lived with him, and I was given to understand the second two children of his lived with the mother. She was kept away from us – a number of ugly things were said about her character and why he’d chosen to divorce. Having never heard her perspective on the matter I cannot say what really happened. But as I grew older and heard my mother’s occasional whispers on the situation, I grew to understand that not only had she been adulterous, but she had crossed racial lines to do so. The daughter he took with him was purportedly his own, and passed for white – the other two children were clearly of non-white ancestry, thus he rejected them and we did not associate with them. (I did meet her sister a few times, and saw a picture of her brother.) It was not until I was an adult that I thought carefully one day about my cousin’s appearance and asked my mother if, in her opinion, she could really have the father she supposedly had – in other words, was she possibly non-white as well? My mother said she’d wondered but never dared say a word.
I have to wonder now how many families that are supposedly “white” and how many people who are supposedly “white”, have such secrets. Now, my cousin passes for white. I will not pretend otherwise, and will not say she does not have white privilege. What I will say is that to some extent every “white” person with brown hair and eyes should perhaps consider that their “whiteness” is a carefully contrived pose not resembling any pure line of descent from European ancestors alone – that in short, being “white” is a sham, a social position rather than any objective condition of being. Furthermore, I would posit that the worship of the fair-skinned, blue-eyed blond is racism white people turn even against themselves and use to rank white people against other white people in a game of supremacy. Appearances always being used against woman more than against men, this practice comes out to hurt women in the end more so than it does men, of course.
And to anyone who wants to point out some famous dark haired actress or model, all I can say is this:
While watching “Weeds” a few months ago, one of the characters said disparagingly of another male character with whom he was angry, “What sort of grown man has blond hair anyway” – the implication being that he dyed it and that this was an undesirable trait unfitting of a “real man”. I laughed, finding it funny, but it got me thinking. And thinking, and… I went to our office the next week and we had a meeting, and as I looked around the room I noticed – every single woman there except me bleached her hair. They were all naturally dark-haired, but they universally lightened their hair. All the men were dark-haired as well, or were, before they had gone gray – but none of them lightened theirs.
Who is blond, really, truly blond, not just with light brown hair, but that “flaxen” appearance?
Scandinavians, a very homogenized, light-skinned European culture…
And children. I know lots of kids who are blond in their youth and whose hair darkens to brown in adulthood.
Dark hair is a characteristic of most of the human race, particularly in adults.
So the question is, is the extremely common bleaching and lightening of hair I witnessed among women my (all white) office a literal attempt to “white wash” away any hints of non-European ancestry, or an attempt to infantilize women? Or both?
I come to no real conclusion here, I guess. Just pondering things that still bother me late at night.
